10. Hanie Yee on commercialisation

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Today's episode is a deep dive with Hanie Yee, an industry leader with over 23 years of international experience working in the commercialisation for biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device industries.

Right now, she's the COO of Alimentary, which is a digital health and diagnostic devices startup based in Auckland. And she's also involved in helping researchers get into the startup space.

She's an investment committee chair of the MedTech and Surgical Committee for Return on Science. This is a national research commercialisation program in New Zealand, that leads the establishment of best practice to deliver new research to market from universities research institutes and private companies as well. On top of that and the many other amazing things she does She's a judge and mentor for velocity, which is the university of Auckland's innovation and entrepreneurship program...

Our conversation covers —

* How commercialisation can lead to impact

* Defining your pitch and problem statement

* Talking about IP

* Finding common ground between you and your stakeholders

* The importance of authenticity

* Defining and talking about strategy

* And a whole lot more...

Enjoy, and stay tuned for next week's episode. We'll be releasing weekly for the first 12 episodes, and then switching to every other week to give us a bit more time to release some of the other exciting Amplifying Research projects we have in store for you.

Find Hanie Yee online:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/haniey

https://returnonscience.co.nz/hanie-shahpari-yee

https://www.alimetry.com/our-team

Find Chris online:

https://www.amplifyingresearch.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispahlow

Credits:

Hosted and produced by Chris Pahlow

Edited by Laura Carolina Corrigan

Consulting Producers Maia Tarrell and Michelle Joy

Quotes:

"So if you start with current state, then the future or ideal state, the gap, and how you address that, and the uniqueness on your value proposition, then you've got a pitch, and you can take the audience with you... If you start with, look at what I've come up with, you haven't calibrated the room. You have no idea what people know or don't know or assume. Whereas if you set the scene by creating a calibration of, this is where we are today,  this is where everyone believes we should be, therefore here is the problem, and I'm going to articulate it well to you..."

"The chances are that if they're not doing it, they may have a really good reason. So you have to be sensitive towards that, right? So as a big company, if they don't have a product in X, but they have covered everything behind and everything after, then there may be a very good reason for that. A lot of the time it comes back to IP patents or whatever that may be that you are not aware of. But having that conversation and acknowledging and showing them that you have gone deep and looked at their portfolio with interest, with curiosity, actually signals that you care."

"Most companies, don't like to be threatened, but love people's interest in what they're doing. So it, it has to be come, it has to come across with an element of curiosity and interest like a problem solving, mindset, rather than, ha, gotcha."

"If you don't know about IP, you just have a really good solution or a service or an offering... Do speak to someone who understands it and you trust before going and speaking to that industry partner. Be it through a tech transfer office, be it through an IP firm, legal firm. Get some advice before you go and speak to them. Because that would be the first question that I would ask as someone in the industry from someone who comes and says, Hey, I've got something to talk to you. The first question I'll ask is, where is your IP at?"

"It really depends on who you're speaking with, and where their interests lay. What's that Venn diagram look like, right?  So you want to achieve these things. They want to achieve these other things. What's that overlap looks like?"

"The corporate VC, or a company, or an industry partner, would want something that grows with them. It has to fit their strategy. So you have to modify your pitch, your offering, something that takes that trajectory into the future... Versus if you're talking to a standard VC and they just want to fund this, but then they want to get their return in X amount of time, you need to show how that could happen if they were to invest in you... If you're saying technology, for example, works for surgeons and also for physicians. When you're talking to the surgeons, you have to talk in the context of hospital procurement systems, et cetera. If you're talking to the physicians, talk to them in the context of what happens in their day to day.  Understand who your audience is, where their problems are, where does that come from... And again, going back to the Venn diagram, where does that overlap? with what you want to achieve... And if you have more than one in the room, the Venn Diagram gets more circles. And that area might become smaller, and you need to emphasise exactly where that sweet spot is, that everybody wins. And make sure you come back to that and repeat that. People will hold information that they hear more than once... Start with it, end with it, and make sure you emphasise it a few times in the middle."

"If it doesn't change the bottom line, does it matter? There's been a lot of presentation I've seen that they said, Oh, it changes it significantly. Great. But does it matter to the doctor or the treating physician? Does it matter to whoever is at the end of this, the customer?"

"I had someone who was a very effective, salesperson, I would say, and they did beautiful pitches, but they never sold anything. They always asked the room to give them the top three reasons they think this,  technology would fail. That was their opening line. It was beautiful. Because you get everyone's biases out really quickly, then you know what you're dealing with."

"One of the things I'm going to go back to is be authentic. If you are pitching anybody or anything, be yourself, because the first thing you're selling is trust. The minute the authenticity is not there, the rest doesn't matter because it's very obvious. Most audiences pick on that very, very quickly, consciously or subconsciously and the rest goes away."

"Co-founders, there's a lot of research done on this, that when the times get tough, the ones that have co-founders have really weathered those a lot better than people who have been on their own or have, didn't have someone to share the load with."